Young People Beware

Young people beware of becoming or accepting the rhetoric of global warming deniers. I’m guessing that when a climate scientist such as Dr. Heidi Cullen says that most of the carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere today comes from natural sources, as she does in her book: The Weather of the Future, you would accept it at face value.

Why then—if you are a denier of global warming—can you not accept her further conclusion that most of the additional CO2 that’s been placed in the atmosphere over the last 250 years (years since the beginning of the industrial revolution) comes from us (human beings); especially since you are not asked to accept it at face value but are given scientific evidence to support that conclusion.

Even if you are not trained in the sciences—I will say that you would probably agree that science is testable knowledge used to explain and make predictions about the real world.

For example, it explains the greenhouse effect—that property of a planetary atmosphere that causes a planet’s surface temperature to be higher than it would be without that atmosphere.

Any gas that absorbs sunlight causes greenhouse effect—on earth the important ones are water vapor, CO2, and methane, of these CO2 is the most long lasting.

Dr. Cullen explains how empirical evidence from mass spectrometer measurements show that most of the additional CO2 in the atmosphere since the start of the industrial revolution has the chemical fingerprint of coal, oil, natural gas, and deforestation because these are the only sources that produce CO2 depleted in carbon13 and carbon14 isotopes.

The planet is getting hotter: arctic ice is melting, glaciers are melting, Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are melting and the only major climate forcing change over the last 10,000 years is the addition of CO2 (from approximately 280ppm in 1750 to 390ppm today) all in just 250 years—a blink of the eye in geological terms. Humans caused this and humans are the only ones who can lessen the dire effects of too much global warming.

You young people must get actively involved; you are the ones who will suffer most. I am seventy-three years old and probably will have died by the time the real bad effects of global warming are here. It is my generation and generations before me who are at fault, but mostly my generation because we have the needed scientific information that shows what has to be done to avert a catastrophe.

As a group, however, we won’t act on this information for any number of reasons—the two main ones are greed and self interests. The backbone of this self interest, unbridled capitalism based on fossil fuel use, is severally flawed; it is set up to benefit the minority of the rich and powerful. It only works at all because of an expansion of itself, and there is no more room for expansion; global warming consequences will see to that.

So, you young people must force change on us by voting. You must vote for progressive legislators, ones who will set up government regulations that will deal with global warming. This will require regulation of our capitalistic system to insure a very large middle class, a very small, if any, upper class, and no very poor class—so different from our present system that it might require a new name.

This means you should not vote for Republicans—their very definition, that of being conservative, calls for little or no change—and there must be massive change if young people are to have a planet they can survive on. And you should not vote for any conservative Democrats for the same reason. Also, any Independent candidates, you might want to vote for, should prove they are for progressive change—but then, of course, they are not really Independents, so they should probably get off of the fence they have been sitting on and become progressive Democrats.

I believe the, somewhat natural, rebellion toward authority by young people should be encouraged in this instance. Don’t be influenced by conservative dogma, they want to leave things as they are, to keep the riches they acquired by depriving others—they are not your friends and never have been.

Did the founders of our country mean, in the Declaration of Independence, that all humans are created equal? They didn’t say that. They said all men, didn’t even mention women. They certainly didn’t mean black slaves; they weren’t even counted as a full whole person. They really only meant propertied men, not poor unpropertied men. And it has remained mostly that way ever since, the rich and powerful giving only enough to the next lower class to keep them from becoming too rebellious.

They have, so far, been able to do this by controlling communication with the voting public. At one time even controlling the voting, e.g., women couldn’t vote, unpropertied men couldn’t vote, blacks couldn’t vote, and there were polling rules that denied some others the vote.

The rich and powerful still control much of the communication through well paid “talking-heads” on T.V. and radio and legislators in government though well paid lobbyists in Congress.

But, young people, you still have a chance, the courts have solved the legal issues of voting—the only, but really important, impediment there is apathy; you must get to the voting booth every election.

And the other problem, that of controlling communication, the internet is still open; the rich haven’t been able to control that yet, but they will keep trying—they already use it themselves very effectively.


The scientific evidence says that these global warming consequences will come about if we continue to use fossil fuels as usual. At some point it will become evident to all that the conservative deniers were dead wrong and they will be pariah but by then it will be too late for all of us. There will be too much warming inertia in the climate change pipeline, it will be humanly impossible to stop.

So, beware young people—my generation and those before have inherited a climate-stable planet to live on but unless you act now and repeatedly at every election, you will only inherit a hell on earth.